Guidelines for project meetings

Project meetings are when we discuss about our project. But I have multiple on-going projects, and my memory is short-lived  —  I often forget what we discussed the day after the meeting. Do not assume I remember the goal, the roadmap, or the progress of the project. To get the most out of our meetings, you need to be organized and prepared. Three things matter most:

• Maintain a single running document for all meetings.

• Prepare in advance, with all figures, tables, and numbers in one place  —  do not waste meeting time searching for them.

• Write down actionable items, and make sure they are measurable.

The rest of this page explains each of these, followed by short notes on what to do before, during, and after the meeting.

1. Maintain a single document for all meetings

Keep one running document for the entire project (not a new file each week). Every week, append new content to it. The document should contain, for each meeting:

• Your presentation slides for the meeting.

• Notes on the discussion, decisions, and open questions.

• The list of actionable items resulting from the meeting.

Use GoogleSlides or PPTX (stored on Google Drive), and give me and everyone in the project edit permission. I strongly recommend slides over GoogleDoc, because slides make it easy to embed figures, tables, and diagrams  —  which is what our discussions revolve around.

Why one document instead of many? Because the document is the memory of the project. When we open it, both of us can immediately see where we were last week, what we agreed to try, and what happened. Scattered files across weeks force us to spend the first ten minutes of every meeting reconstructing context, which is exactly what we want to avoid.

2. Prepare in advance, with everything in one place

Before every meeting, put all the figures, tables, numbers, and diagrams you plan to show into your slides for that week. Do not plan to open Jupyter notebooks, W&B dashboards, or your file system during the meeting to “find” a result. If you do, we will lose 5–10 minutes to loading, scrolling, and remembering, and by the time you find the plot, we will both have forgotten why we wanted it.

Concretely, before the meeting:

• Add slides showing the results from this week's experiments (with the key numbers highlighted, not buried in a table).

• Include figures, tables, and graphs for your idea, network architecture, and results.

• Draw a process diagram for the steps you did, or for how the components of your method connect with each other. This is much clearer than saying “I did this, then that, and then…”, or “the output of A is fed into B and then C”.

• Bring the actionable items from the previous meeting, marked done partially done not done, so we can start there.

Preparing in advance forces you to think about the results before the meeting rather than during it. Very often, the act of preparing the slides will surface the questions you should be asking me  —  which is far more useful than me asking them for you on the spot.

3. Write down actionable items, and make them measurable

At the end of every meeting, write down the actionable items in the shared document, in front of me. This has two purposes.

Writing forces clarification. When something is only spoken, it feels agreed upon, but the two of us may have very different pictures of what “try a few learning rates” actually means. Writing it down surfaces the ambiguity while I am still in the room to resolve it. Without this, mismatched expectations between us silently accumulate  —  you spend a week on something you thought I asked for, I expected something different, and by the following meeting both of us are frustrated. This is preventable, and it is prevented by writing things down.

Actionable items must be measurable. An item that only describes an action leaves the target open-ended, so neither of us can tell whether it has been completed. State both the action and the expected result or deliverable  —  a number, a plot, a comparison, a written summary.

Deadlines. By default, every actionable item is due by the next meeting, so there is no need to write “by next meeting” on each one. Only state a deadline explicitly when it is different from the default  —  e.g., “within 2 weeks”, “by Friday” (if that is earlier than next meeting), or “before submission on 15 Nov”.

The table below contrasts vague items with measurable ones.

Notice the pattern in the right column: every item names what to do, what artifact to produce (plot, table, summary, number), and when it is due. This is what makes the item measurable and what lets both of us agree, at the next meeting, whether it has been completed.

Before the meeting

• Update the running document with the slides for this week.

• Have all figures, tables, and numbers already in the slides  —  do not plan to fetch them live.

• Draw a process/architecture diagram for anything with more than two components.

• Review the actionable items from the last meeting and mark their status.

During the meeting

• Start by reminding me about the project:

  • Where we were, and where we are heading.

  • The hypothesis and main idea.

  • The status of last meeting's actionable items.

• Present your slides:

  • Describe what you did and show the results.

  • Do not just show the numbers (e.g. accuracy)  —  interpret and analyze them. What do the numbers tell us? Which of our assumptions were confirmed or invalidated? (See also scientific debugging.)

• Take notes on the key points of our discussion.

• Write down the actionable items in the shared document, in front of me, following the “measurable” pattern above.

After the meeting

• Fill in more details on the meeting notes while they are still fresh.

• Refine the actionable items into concrete tasks with deadlines.

• Convince yourself that each actionable item is worth doing. Do not do them merely because I said so  —  if you can see the reason, you will do them better. If you cannot see the reason, message me before you start.

Template

• Use this template as a starting point.